Faith – Family- Frugality

It’s not “Going to be Okay”

This post is part of the 31 Days Writing Challenge, in which a group of writers post a piece every day for the month of October. Want to read all of my posts in this series? Click here.

When I’m having a rough time, I feel like the world is going to end. When I don’t know what choice to make, when my heart hurts because it longs for something that it’s not quite time for, when Husband-Man gets crazy sick out of no-where, when when Husband-Man and I aren’t speaking the same language, I feel desperate. I feel alone and hopeless. And I forget who God is. I forget His faithfulness.

My internal dialogue when I start to notice that I’m getting desperate and hopeless has been, up until this year, “it’ll be okay”. But that stopped helping me this year. Looking at the phrase, it doesn’t apply to today. It only applies to the future. It doesn’t speak to today. It doesn’t touch now. It tells my heart: “just wait. For some undisclosed future moment. One day, you’ll be fine. Today, you’re not.”

Looking at how God describes Himself in scripture, “it’ll be okay” doesn’t match. In Exodus, when Moses was flipping out about doing what God told him to do, the Bible says “God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:14, ESV) God calls Himself “I am”. That, grammatically, means that God spans past, present, and future. Think about it. “I am” speaks to all of time. He is God and He is good across time. He is as good tomorrow as He is today. So “it’ll be okay” means that God is only good tomorrow to my heart. It means that I’m waiting for the end of whatever is making me panic and I’m not seeking God in the process.

I’m not working to honor Him now. I’m not praising Him for going through what hurts but is ultimately for good.

So, instead, I say “it’s okay now”. Why? Because God is good all the time. Because I don’t need answers or resolution. I need Jesus. And I can draw near to Him NOW. That’s the only thing that helps.

I love this. It’s something I’ve been working on with my son too. He is very sensitive and gets upset a LOT. And my first response is to say “it will be okay,” but it doesn’t feel that way to him and if anything, makes him more upset.

When I hear that sometimes, it makes me feel worse, too. I react very strongly to just about everything, and that future tense of the phrase makes me feel very hopeless.
I hope that you all have success as you work on his reactions.

This reminds me, a little, of when I was living in Asia. Before I was in Asia, I thought I was generally a positive person, generally happy. But the strains of living in a difficult place and working with challenging people made me realize that even my very positivity and happiness had to come from Him. My happiness before was perhaps circumstantial or of my flesh. Deeper suffering takes us to a deeper need of Him. We need something more than “it will be OK”, we need real truth to dig our feet into, so we can stand. Thank you, you are a good writer!!

Julie, thank you so much for your comment!
I found it to be very painful to have what was easy to do from my own strength to be stripped away when stuff got hard, but it is God pointing us back to him.